Two years ago today, I was sitting at my computer and listening to the radio, much as I'm doing right now, when I heard the news. In short order I rushed over to a little park in my Brooklyn neighborhood that had a perfect view of the harbor and lower Manhattan. It's across the street from a hospital, and about 100 of us -- nurses, residents, orderlies, deliverymen and neighbors -- watched, mostly in complete silence. From there I witnessed the collapse of the first tower. It was obvious then that the second one would fall, too, but it was too much violence; I didn't want to see it. By the time I'd walked home (maybe 8 minutes), my arms were covered in ash, pushed my way by the prevailing winds. For several days thereafter, it was common in my then neighborhood to stumble across a manila envelope or file folder or office memo resting on the sidewalk, burned slightly around the edges.
Like everyone in that park -- like everyone everywhere -- I knew we had entered a new period of history. But two years on, this new period looks far more like what preceded it than it ought to, and when history eventually gets around to rendering judgments about what opportunities were squandered or missed or contemptuously dismissed, its j'accuse will be directed squarely at the current administration, whose ideological imperatives have trumped practical reality at every turn.
This could have and should have been an era of unprecedented national -- indeed, international -- unity against a common enemy. President Bush could have gone to the other nations of the world and made a case for a new age of international cooperation against terrorism and fundamentalism. That cooperation, and that fight, would have been aimed squarely at the Taliban and at the House of Saud, and, to a lesser extent, at the smaller terrorist networks that operate in the Middle East. To be sure, this wouldn't have been easy. There would have been (as there are) vast disagreements between the United States and nations of Europe over how to deal with the Palestinian question and what to do about Saudi Arabia. But a historical process would have begun, and the United States would clearly and unambiguously have occupied the moral high ground in such a case. That United States would have been proposing a new and forward-looking framework for foreign policy, much as the "Wise Men" of the post-World War II period did.
Yes, the post-World War II framework wasn't without its downsides, which became more and more apparent as the years went on. It was not clear in 1947, say, that the United States would eventually be in the business of supporting covert overthrows of elected leaders. (Dean Acheson nixed a suggested toppling of Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh in 1952; it only took place once the Republicans and John Foster Dulles got power.) And the logic of that framework pushed America -- and the Soviet Union -- toward that behavior, and into the tragic error of Vietnam. But it's important to remember that the framework did plenty of good, too -- the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, the stabilization of Israel, the rescue of Greece from a probable communist government. Whatever its flaws, it was a framework that recognized that we had entered uncharted historical territory that demanded new institutions and responses. On balance, the Wise Men rose to their historic occasion.
The Bush administration, by contrast, has sunk to its. It has not created a new framework of any sort. It has done exactly the opposite. It has used the occasion of the new era as cover for implementing some very old ideas, ideas the neoconservatives have been kicking around for at least a decade and perhaps since the late 1970s. Remember, it was also two years ago today that Donald Rumsfeld sent out the instruction to his subordinates, "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit SH at same time as UBL." "UBL" was "Usama bin Laden," as he was mostly called then; as for "SH," I imagine you can guess. "See if good enough" sounds awfully like a fishing expedition to me. After all, what underling of Rumsfeld's was going to read that cable and have the gumption to come back to him and say, "Sorry, sir, no evidence"? It seems hard to imagine that there's any inference to be drawn from this other than the obvious one: This administration was itching for an excuse to take a shot at Hussein. September 11 provided it. All that had to be done was to convince Americans that Hussein, in addition to his many other malign characteristics, was a terrorist and was somehow responsible for the attacks. As we've seen, that sort of convincing isn't so difficult to do.
There were and have always been good reasons for removing Saddam Hussein from power. But this excursion was retailed to us on false pretenses by a bunch of used-car salesmen, and now the deceptions and obfuscations have piled up. Iraq is the center of terrorism, as Bush asserted in his speech Sunday night? Well, if it wasn't it sure is now, as fundamentalists flock to Iraq to have a bash at the Great Satan.
It all could have been very different. We could have had an administration that responded to September 11 by saying, "Let's think about the best way to unite the civilized world in this fight." Instead, we have one that responded by saying, "Now's our chance to do all the things we've been wanting to do for 20 years! And better still, now we can just label everyone who disagrees with us as unpatriotic!" Not very inspiring, and not much of a tribute to those 3,100 people who were forced two years ago today to look terror in the face in their final moments on earth.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
